This invention relates to a process for electronic document redaction.
Businesses around the world are having to cope with the increasingly regulated business world, particularly in regard to their responsibilities and accountability to their Board of Directors, shareholders, and customers.
These new regulations, which promote an increasing transparency of the business processes and activities, require businesses to release for public scrutiny, documents that may contain information that is commercially sensitive, or information that is confidential to the business.
Business transparency ensures that there is accountability in the decision making process, to remove, or reduce the possibility of one or more persons making business decisions for their own gain at the expense of the organisation.
Government departments, governmental agencies, and the public sector in general desire, or are required to release documents that may contain sensitive or confidential information, for public scrutiny. In order for these documents to be released, particular information must be removed so that, for example, parties named in the document are not disadvantaged by the release of the document, and the information contained within. Some of the types of information that may require redaction are names of children or family members, financial accounting information, etc.
Document compliance is a requirement of best business practice, for example, the Sarbanes Oxley in the United States, and various other acts for example, the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts that are in force in designated territories. Compliance is also required for international record keeping standards from the United States such as the Department of Defence 5015.2, United kingdom's Public Records Office 2002, and European Moreq.
In order to comply with the aforesaid business regulations and best business practice, documents that are required to be redacted must be done so according to the legal, processing, and reporting requirements, as required by the aforesaid standards. In some instances, where information is to be redacted from a document, markings are to applied to the document where information is removed.
There are known methods by which to redact documents. One method is by using a paper based method, where the paper document is reproduced, redacted, then reproduced again for distribution. Any information below the redaction marking of the distribution copy will not be recoverable within this document. This method may be acceptable in a small organisation where there is a relatively small amount of documentation to be redacted, however in a large organisation, where most documents are now held as computer files, a computer based method is required for business processes, ease of use and storage of the large numbers of documents used.
There are computer applications available for office use, on which documents are created and edited. An example of such applications are Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat. These applications also provide the facility for a user to redact documents, however, where Adobe Acrobat is used, a third party plugin must be used in order to redact a document in PDF format. However, the correct computer applications and methods must be used to securely redact documents.
Electronic documents created with the aforementioned types of application contain hidden data known as metadata, consisting of revision history and other data, within the file of the electronic document. Thus, where a document has been redacted, the redacted information may still be contained within the electronic file. The skilled addressee will therefore be able to recover text within the document that was previously changed or deleted. Therefore, redaction of documents with standard office computing tools is an unsecure method, and cannot be relied upon to remove all of the redacted information from the document, as in some cases a copy of the redacted electronic document itself may be publicly released.
Other known methods of document redaction are scanning the paper document, and thereby converting this document into an image file. In order to redact this image file, the user must use graphic manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop. However, this method is relatively slow, and the user must have access to the specialised graphic manipulation software which is not only complex to use, but expensive to purchase. The user must also be proficient in it use in order to achieve the desired result.
Traditional redaction processes have a number of disadvantages. One disadvantage is that traditional electronic redaction processes merely make invisible, on the face of the document, the text that has been redacted. Although the text is removed from view, it may still reside within the documents electronic file as hidden data.
Another disadvantage is that redacted data residing within a documents electronic file can be easily recovered by the skilled addressee.
A further disadvantage is that redaction using paper based methods is slow, inconvenient for large organisations, and poses storage problems for the large numbers of files held.
Yet another disadvantage is that where large organisations must redact many documents, the documents to be redacted may not be held in a central repository at any particular branch of the organisation. Therefore, it may prove to be very difficult for one or a small number of users in one location to redact these documents.